“Although, I had some understanding of of this “climate cover-up” I liked to think of it as mostly over, too. It was sobering and frustrating to learn more details about this ongoing campaign and its success in the minds of a majority of the public.”

“Climate Cover-Up summarizes four years of investigative journalism into the inception of the campaign, how it was funded through Washington think tanks and how it used discredited “scientists” and partisan politics to marginalize the climate change issue.”

“Chapter Four, from which this first extract is taken, largely concerns the formation and activities of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a monstrous “Astroturf” which was created on the suggestion of the public relations company APCO (the same company that fought to promote tobacco in the face of virtually all medical advice). It also discusses at length the Astroturfing activities of The American Petroleum Institute (API). This section introduces a veteran of the anti-climate change lobby, Frederick Seitz, but most importantly “Mr Junk Science”, Steven Milloy. Enjoy.”

Previous Comments

Its a great book.They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If it is, would this force the IPCC to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs?

Not according to Phil Jones: “That’s only an experiment in the lab, albeit a very big lab. It’s still not enough to prove that his theory is happening in the real world.”

“Remember - if you write a book, you’ve only got to persuade the publisher that it’s a good read.”

on cloud formation will be completely independent of the physics of greenhouse gases and will be in addition to the role greenhouse gases play in Earth’s climate. It would be another forcing, but it would not displace or disprove the forcing of greenhouse gases.

The sky has changed in the last 3 or 4 years. More thin pale white clouds or streaks. The sky over my head is seldom clear bright blue; it is pale blue or whitish and contains old jet contrails and other little splotches of white. From pictures around the world, I see it is worldwide.
I suspect the change comes from increased air pollution of some sort. Whether Asian “brown cloud” distributing globally or increased jet travel or increased water retention, I dont know.
What effect these clouds and paling have on global temperature I also dont know. I have not found much info online on this.

The sky has changed, indeed. There are many fluffy white clouds covering the blue sky. As a result, the temperature has gone down. If you want to know about clouds you should check out roy spencer because he’s the only one that seems to be doing cloud research. I must warn you though, he thinks the clouds control the temperature, not Co2

On a clear summer day, jet contrails used to vanish behind the silver flash of the jet. Starting about 3 years ago, the contrails streak across the sky, persisting long after the plane has gone.
The skies here used to be bright blue and gorgeous (okay, gorgeous is subjective) on some days in summer and winter. Now the skies are pale blue at best and littered with little spots of white.
I agree that there are better measurements.

The influence of clouds on climate depends on what height they are at, and what kind. The cooling effect, if any, is temporary – like a kid building a wall of sand stops the incoming tide from rising higher for a few waves.

Your just assuming cloud formation is not as strong a forcing as CO2. 8,000ppm Co2 on a submarine is the danger level for the people on board. This means we have plenty, and I mean plenty of time to find new energies. In fact, it will be another generation, not ours that discovers a new energy that is as safe as coal, oil and natural gas.

Speaking of dumb comments, your statement about the danger level on a submarine is completely irrelevent, since the concern is not that we will be breathing the increased CO2, it is that the increased CO2 way up where we do not breathe is bouncing more solar energy back to the earth and thus causing global warming; also that the increased CO2 in the acean is making the ocean more acidic and killing things.

ok vj, why don’t you share with everyone then how long it takes to add one molecule of co2 to our atmosphere? I think you won’t tell because it makes your case look very weak. The answer is it takes 5yrs to add one molecule of CO2 to 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. We currently at about 38 or 39ppt, so even if your saying 450ppm is the danger level, we are still a long long long way off my friend. Give me your address and I’ll see to it that you get a piece of coal in your stocking this christmas, courteousy of Shooshmon the Coal Troll!

I’m neither a writer not a blogger, but I went out and bought your book as soon as I heard about it. It’s very good. It puts together a lot of information that I have read all over the Internet.

A few concerns. American readers will be confused about a lot of the Canadian politics (I bet less than 1% of Americans know what a riding is – I don’t recall you defining the term), but, thanks to media saturation, typically the opposite is not true.

Nowhere mentioned (as I recall) is anything about how the Republicans abolished the Office of Technology Assessment. That is an important point which should have been included in making the misinformation campaign so much easier.

One recommendation: put footnotes and documentation together in one document. You restrict the documentation to direct quotations. Unfortunately, it’s not just deniers who are skeptical, there are many people on the fence who can easily fall for a “you lie!” moment on this topic. When you say, e.g., that Group X published an internal memo that says “Y” we need a link to that memo.

The Mann Hockey Stick study was dragged through the mud by Republican Senator James Inhofe to somehow prove his theory that “global warming is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” The National Academy of Science was even pulled into it and they exonerated Mann’s study. The study is almost 10 years old, there’s been hundreds of more papers published that provide evidence of human-cause climate change.
You’re using a 10 year old paper as a strawman to knock down, even though the paper was found to be sound. http://www.desmogblog.com/nrc-exonerates-hockey-stick-graph-ending-mann-...

There is only one arbitrator of what is proper statistics, and that is from the very best statistician in the USA.. read the Wegman report, and here is a key reply to the Senate committee:(“Such a strategy carries no statistical integrity and cannot be used as a basis for drawing sound inferential conclusions” ie.. it is bullshite!!)

……Dr. Gulledge included in his testimony a slide showing the graph of A emulation of the MBH and MBH-corrected for decentering and the
Gaspe tree-ring series. Were you aware of their reanalysis of MBH99
prior to the time you finalized your report? Do you agree or disagree
with their reanalysis of MBH99? If you disagree, please state the basis
for your disagreement.

Wegman Ans: Yes, we were aware of the Wahl and Ammann simulation. We
continue to disagree with the reanalysis for several reasons. Even granting the unbiasedness of the Wahl and Ammann study in favor of his advisor’s methodology and the fact that it is not a published refereed paper, the reconstructions mentioned by Dr. Gulledge, and illustrated in his testimony, fail to account for the effects of the bristlecone/foxtail pines.

Wahl and Ammann reject this criticism of MM based on the fact that if
one adds enough principal components back into the proxy, one obtains
the hockey stick shape again. This is precisely the point of contention. It is a point we made in our testimony and that Wahl and Ammann make as well. A cardinal rule of statistical inference is that the method of analysis must be decided before looking at the data. The rules and strategy of analysis cannot be changed in order to obtain the desired result. Such a strategy carries no statistical integrity and cannot be used as a basis for drawing sound inferential conclusions.

I checked your article about CO2 levels on submarines, which was very well written. Then, I commented that if 8,000ppm of Co2 was the danger level on a sub, the threshold must be higher for the entire earth. Richard Littlebrained Littlemore immediately responded by claiming we would see global castrophes at 450ppm of CO2. He then deleted his comment. I was wondering if you had a guess at how ppm we could tolerate since richard obviously has no clue.

It got deleted because it was a reply to an offensive post that you made.
RL was quite right, though. 8,000ppm in a submarine is dangerous to human health. 450ppm in the earth’s atmosphere is enough to set off all kinds of feedbacks that nobody will be able to stop.

I’m really fed up with arguing the toss with those who think Mann walks on water.
The Mann is a fraud. McIntyre said so, but more importantly so did Wegman and the NAS. That should have been end of story. But no.

The poison website “SurrealClimate” was said up to obscure the unpalatable truth.

Alarmists say say “Big Oil” funds Realists. Maybe, but it is peanuts compared with the slush fund for Alarmism. Who do you think funds UnrealClimate? (ans. Fenton and they’ll deny that too!).

Now for my opinion- and yes what follows is opinion- Alarmists should be happy because that is all they have.

Climate science is so politicized it’s become rubbish science i.e. Unprecedented warming, unprecedented ice melt, unprecedented ice shelf collapse, unprecedented temperatures. The headlines have to keep coming in order for the funding and attention to flow. Yet all the time, since 1998 (Mann’s Hockey Stick bithday), Global temperatures have been falling.
Gavin Schmidt claims to be apolitical but in my reasoned opinion he is a “Watermelon”- green on the outside and (Communist) red within. Michael Mann is another one and James Hansen isn’t even a question. The FoolsClimate website was started and is maintained by Fenton Communications. NutsClimate claim they are uncompensated by Fenton and I believe them (up to a point) but remember Fenton is a 501C tax free corporation. These corporations are part of a network for illegal funding to be distributed for political goals. That ISTHEIRPURPOSE and they are clearly poltical and therefore illegal. The whole point of a network of 501’s is to distribute the money in a non-transparent way. The fact that Fenton didn’t even take RubbishClimate to lunch as claimed on CretinClimate’s site doesn’t mean that another arm of the 501 network didn’t receive 200,000 and distribute that to compensate some project for Mann. Non transparent tax free distribution of funds is their purpose.

You clearly know your stuff as you understand Fenton Communications. Their background with Al Gore goes back to the early 1980s. They and Al Gore have been running this global warming story and getting rich off of it for over 20 years.

I do believe that Al Gore once genuinely thought that he had the science right. Of course, correlation is not causation, and now that the correlation has become unstuck(cooling going on)even he should not be so obtuse as to know he is wrong. Most likely he keeps looking at the 3 billion venture capital fund that he is part of and wants to keep the ball rolling. It would be a financial disaster to have the warmist cause cancelled due to a cooling climate.

but then again, AGW is a religion, and people believe what they want to believe, like the sun revolves around the earth..

How do you know that 450ppm is the danger zone? All I have to say is that it seems strange that the threshold on a submarine is 8,000ppm, yet for the entire it is 450ppm. Could you please elaborate on your explanation? It seems to me that your number is simply a guess because it cannot be tested.

If the CO2 in an enclosed space hits 8000 ppm, it is unhealthy to breathe. Simple. But long before that, at 450 ppm, the CO2 has an impact on the amount of heat that is absorbed. It’s still safe to breathe at that level, but the balance in the atmosphere would be off just enough to allow the positive feedbacks to get rolling, and once they are rolling we are all in serious trouble.

the co2 that isn’t added to the atmosphere escapes to outerspace. Its no surprise woman fall for the global warming hoax so easily. Woman ought to be ashamed too because the first woman to ever receive a phd in physics thinks global warming is a crock. You keep talking about this 450ppm and all of a sudden Oh! the feedbacks! the feedbacks! Then the feedbacks will kick in! Says who? Oh yeah, says the computer model what a joke. I hope this hoax costs obama the next election. I’m still waiting for someone to show me a green product that is cheaper than all of it’s competitors, meanwhile. Keep up the fight Edb, the best case scenario is all these idiot bloggers lose their jobs when their manufactured job is shown to be a hoax.

Tell me, Shoosh, who is this “first woman to receive a PhD in physics” to whom you refer? You clearly have someone in mind – let’s have a name, university and year? Are you referring to the US, Canada, the UK, France? In 1903, under the supervision of Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, physicist and Nobel Laureate, received her DSc from the University of Paris. Granted, this is not a PhD – in fact it is a much more prestigious degree in the scientific context.

So what is your point, Shoosh? Is VJ right? Are you a sexist? Misogynist maybe? This lashing out at “woman” who “ought to be ashamed” is a complete non sequitor. You’ve exposed yourself. Pathetic.

What about all of the women between Marie Curie and Joanne Simpson? And why zero-in on women? What has that got to with anything?

Lately, Rick, you have shown a very credible kind of skepticism – a truly open mind. I sense that you are really looking for answers. Can you tell me why Shooshmon should take this turn? My interpretation of this is that he (and a whole lot of other deniers) are getting a bit frantic. I look at the scientific literature and see report after report saying that the latest IPCC has under-played the danger. The research since the cut-off date for inclusion in the report suggests that things are moving much more quickly that they had thought. And the Summary for Policy Makers is further watered down.

What on earth has my gender got to do with whether climate change is an issue? This person has another agenda.

I’m not really expecting to find absolute answers but I enjoy sorting through things a little bit. As far as Shoosh and his motivations and his views of women - well - lets just say that’s above my pay grade.

Does it bother any of you green-communists that your evangelist, Jim Hogan also works for a public relations firm the represents an industry that more wastefully burns fossil fuels than any other business?

I’m speaking of the Luxury Ocean Liner cruise businesses that he lobbies for. Isn’t this sort of like bringing your own slave to a abolishionist convention?

Next he doubles down by representing the petro-chemical industry polluters who make car tires?

Are car tires and luxury cruises “green”?

And then he also lobbies for more and bigger sea ports enabling goods to be shipped all over the world when we all know thet “green” means never to use things that aren’t made within walking distance of whre they are consumed.

Go forth ans sin no more Mr Hogan

This guy is a false prophet, a beezelbub, a green satan, an environmental lucifer, old scratch as it were.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

Keep In Touch

Officials in the state of Florida are finally taking action against climate change. They have declared war on global warming. They are taking a firm stand and making bold actions to finally end the threat of climate change.

But before you get too excited, we aren’t talking about the climate change that threatens our coastlines, water supplies, or agriculture. We’re talking about the actual language used to describe these events.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is no longer allowed to use the terms “climate change” or “global...